Magnus Liungman is the CEO and cofounder of Doctrin, a Swedish startup that is changing healthcare. While on a recent visit to Stockholm I sat down with Magnus, who informed me that a shocking 84% of the time spent at doctor’s offices is spent answering simple questions. He told me that Doctrin believes that patients are an underutilized resources that wants to be involved in their care. Doctrin enables that by allowing patients to fill out information about their conditions before seeing a doctor. This allows doctors to spend quality time solving the patient’s problems instead of wasting time asking routine questions.
Why did you decide to start Doctrin?
After two years in the UK working as country manager for a health tech company, I finally realized that supporting healthcare was my passion and mission in life. However, I also felt that I could not have sufficient impact in my current role and I consequently decided to quit my job. After leaving that role, I spend two months researching all health tech segments with the ambition to find a technology that fulfilled two criteria: at least a 10% effect on healthcare expenditure with maintained or improved quality, and a technology mature enough to create value from day one. Doctrin was the answer
It is easier to persevere if you have a passion for what you are doing
How does Doctrin fundamentally improve the experience of seeing a doctor?
Everything that we do at Doctrin is based on two underlying beliefs:
- Patients are an underutilized resource that wants to be involved in the care process
- Non-real-time communication (asynchronous communication) is an underutilized form of communication in healthcare with enormous potential
Doctrin creates technology for healthcare providers based on these two beliefs.
The medical space is unique in the sense that you are often literally dealing with life and death situations. What have been the hardest challenges about doing a startup in this area?
The challenge lies in being extremely mission driven and creating a culture around that mission. If we can continue to unite all employees in Doctrin around our mission to help and support healthcare, we can significantly reduce the risk of making hazardous decisions.
What is Doctrin’s business model?
Doctrin provides web based software service as a subscription model to healthcare providers
Let’s get down to the nitty gritty of building a business. At the very beginning you had a great idea—but how did you take that from idea to reality?
In retrospect, I would be inclined to believe that my entire life has been preparing me for Doctrin. I already knew one of the largest healthcare providers that helped me to validate the idea. I knew angel investors that shared my passion in healthcare and who also believed in me, that enabled us to close our seed round in a matter of weeks.
The priority for myself was to validate my idea so I spoke to several healthcare providers who quickly validated that we were on to something good. After that I needed to find someone to support me in the medical and technical domain. I managed to convince one of my closest friends who just completed his PhD to join Doctrin and I brought in a part time CTO. We put together a pitch deck and two weeks later we completed our seed round.
Because of a bar bet, you completed an Ironman after a mere six months of training. Can you tell us about what this experience taught you about perseverance and success?
A couple of thoughts. First, I believe perseverance and success is more closely linked than competence/attributes and success. Second, it is easier to persevere if you have a passion for what you are doing. Third and last, if you do not have passion but want to accomplish a goal, tell as many people as possible about your goal – it will make quitting that much harder.
We put together a pitch deck and two weeks later we completed our seed round.
What advice do you have for others thinking about entering the health and medical startup space?
It would probably be premature for me to give advice. But if you ask me what I believe have been a success factor for Doctrin, it is a deep understanding of how healthcare works, the culture within healthcare organizations, the challenges facing the industry and the naïve conviction that we know what the solution is.
Keep up with Doctrin by visiting their homepage.
Take Risks Be Happy would like to thank Jonas Axelsson of Norrsken House and Marie Sundström of Invest Stockholm for their assistance, without which this interview would not have been possible.
